Here’s what happens when the readers choose the front page story

19 Mar 2014 • blog.newswhip.com

What if front pages were selected by newspapers’ readers instead of their editors?  At NewsWhip, we’re always interested in the news stories people are choosing to share – and how those stories differ from the normal news stories editors put on the front pages of big newspapers. So we ran a little experiment.

On Wednesday morning, we gathered the front pages of leading newspapers in several countries. Then we used Spike to check the most shared stories from each one.

A little work at our end, and we used those most shared stories to make new “people powered” front pages for each newspaper – giving the most shared story the most prominence, the second most shared the second most prominence, etc.

I'm no fan of "big media" but one has to think it would be bad for societyif the news changed from "the news" to "what's popular on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram".